Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi opened up about the band’s final show with Ozzy Osbourne, Back to the Beginning, revealing his initial reluctance to take part and reflecting on losing his bandmate shortly after the event.
Iommi explained that he was hesitant to sign on for the show at first, believing the band’s previous farewell tour should have marked the true end. He detailed how the charitable nature of the event ultimately changed his mind. He also spoke about his final conversation with Osbourne the night before he passed away, as well as his concerns over Osbourne performing two separate sets during the show.
“It was a great event. At first I didn’t agree with doing it, purely because I thought, well hang on, we’ve done the End Tour, and that should have been the end. You know, I didn’t want to do The End, and, oh, here we are again, we’re back. I didn’t want to do that,” Iommi said.
“But since they said it was for charity and the whole thing’s going to be done and all these bands are going to come forward and it’ll all be for charity, I thought, well yeah, that’s good. And so I did it, and I’m glad we did now, because we had a chance for the four of us to really finish off where we started.”
Iommi then turned to his last exchange with Osbourne, describing the days surrounding the singer’s death.
“And, you know, I spoke to Ozzy afterwards, after the show, well the next day, and he was really thrilled that we could go and do it, you know, that we’d done it. In fact, I spoke to him the night before he passed, which was really strange, because he said, ‘I’m feeling really tired.’ I said, ‘Well yeah, I’m tired.’ You know, it’s the aftereffects of everything and thinking, well, you know. And then of course the next thing, he’d gone.”
“It was really a hell of a shock, really. Yeah, and he had done two sets, of course. He did one. He done two sets, and which I did say to him, I don’t think you should do two sets. You’ve got to do one or the other, because I think it’s too much. I thought he was… I said, you’re going to either blow your voice and you’re going to get too much.”
Iommi added that the format of the show had already been decided before he could raise his concerns further.
“But it was already set that he was doing his own set and then the Sabbath set. Because I said, well look, you know, we could just walk out afterwards and say thanks to everybody. But no, we ended up playing and he ended up doing his set. So I think it was, you know, he had to do a lot of… It was tough for him.”
Osbourne passed away shortly after the show, which Iommi described as a rare full-circle moment for the original members of Black Sabbath.
The emotional weight of that final performance only grows heavier when placed against the timeline of what followed and the scale of what the event actually accomplished.
Back to the Beginning drew tens of thousands of fans to Villa Park in Birmingham. The event also pulled in a global livestream audience, with proceeds directed toward Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and Acorns Children’s Hospice. Reported totals for the charitable haul have varied widely in the months since, ranging from figures in the low millions to estimates well into the hundreds of millions. Organizers and the Osbourne family have worked to clarify the exact sums distributed to each cause.
Osbourne died on July 22, less than three weeks after taking the stage for that final performance with the band that made him famous. The timing turned what was already billed as a farewell concert into something far more poignant. It cemented Back to the Beginning as the last time fans saw the original Black Sabbath lineup together.
Iommi has since suggested that Osbourne’s ability to make it through the show at all spoke to his determination. The guitarist said he believed Ozzy essentially held out long enough to get through that final set. That belief adds another layer to Iommi’s account of urging his bandmate not to push himself by performing twice in one night.
For Iommi, the show has become inseparable from the loss that followed it. What began as a reunion he was reluctant to join turned into a closing chapter he now considers essential. He values it both for the charitable cause it served and for the chance it gave the four founding members to stand together one last time.
